Dems Shoot Themselves in the Foot Again On Guns

Kurt Schlichter

5/13/2013 12:01:00 AM - Kurt Schlichter

Despite suffering the most humiliating rejection of his presidency, President Obama and the liberal establishment are determined to revive their failed gun control scheme. That’s a good thing. The Republicans should remember Napoleon’s warning that you should never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake. This mistake will cost the Democrats dearly in 2014.

We need to understand that the motivation behind the gun grabbing campaign has always been more than just naked political calculation. Certainly, liberals think it will help motivate their base and maybe shore up the squishy suburban mom demographic for 2014, but this is really a campaign fueled by emotion.

That emotion is hate.

This isn’t about dead children. If saving kids was their real motivation, liberals would have long ago allowed the police to end the daily slaughter in Democrat-owned war zones like Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C. No, this campaign is driven by elitist hatred for regular Americans who refuse to bend to their will, who defiantly live life on their own terms, and who stubbornly resist accepting the moral supremacy of the urban liberals who would rule them.

They want to show us who is boss, to put us in our place, to take away the proud symbols of – and the tools that protect – our independence for one reason and one reason only. They want to show that they can. They want to demonstrate that what rights we have come not from our maker but from them, to be granted or withdrawn as they please.

They want us disarmed, demoralized and defeated. They are furious that we refuse to allow it, but anger is a poor foundation for building strategy.

Their anger clouds their thinking – they simply do not understand their opponents and seem to feel that considering their opponents’ motivations, even if only to come up with a way to defeat them, are somehow beneath their dignity. Sun Tzu knew what happens when a general does not understand his enemy. He loses.

Look at the mainstream media’s reporting on the gun bill. Has there been, anywhere in the mainstream media, a comprehensive analysis of the substantive problems those opposing Toomey-Manchin had with the bill? Of course not – instead, the media regurgitates the clichéd 90% support figure for “background checks” as if 90% of the American people had sat down and parsed the legislative language of this particular bill.

People had real, specific concerns about this bill that the media utterly ignored. People were concerned that they could suddenly face felony charges for doing things they had always done, like lending a life-long buddy a hunting rifle or borrowing a pistol while target shooting. They saw that the alleged prohibition on a federal gun registry was not supported by the language of the bill. People were rightly suspicious at how this was another of those obnoxious “deals” rushed to the floor for a vote without the kind of committee analysis and development that we were taught in civics class is how a bill is supposed to become a law.

Moreover, people were angered by the bald-faced lies they were fed. It’s not reassuring to be told that “Nobody wants to take your guns” when key Democrats like Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senator Diane Feinstein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg manifestly do. Sometimes they seem to forget that YouTube tubed the era of the memory hole.

Nor do gun freedom advocates appreciate the cynical and intellectually bankrupt tactic of shutting down reasoned debate by dragging out the relatives of murder victims to scream at politicians. It didn’t help that not only did the bill fail to do anything that might have prevented Sandy Hook, but that opposition to it was portrayed as tantamount to condoning child murder.

People tend to get angry when libeled.

And those people made their concerns known, spurring their elected representatives to refuse to obey the elite’s command. This infuriated the elite, who consider themselves every senator’s true constituency. They are morally offended that senators might take their cues from voters back home in their own states rather than from the political and media mandarins on the coasts. So, the liberals are now taking their anger out on the red state Democrats who declined to commit political suicide to please the MSNBC crowd, which is great news for Republicans.

The era when gun freedom advocates resided on both sides of the aisle seems to be drawing to a close. Democrats are purging gun ban dissenters, and those voters will go GOP because they will simply have no alternative. Best of all, the red state Democrats who voted for gun rights are still in danger – not only are liberals taking aim at them but voters seeing the party pressure may well decide not to take a chance that their senator will “evolve” once he has won a new six-year term.

The anti-gun campaign has activated only two groups of people, the small circle of liberal media commentators and the huge mass of gun freedom advocates. A couple of out-of-state, paid Organizing for America activists waving pre-printed signage at a town hall is not a grass roots movement.

The only grass roots movement is for gun freedom. The NRA membership rolls are exploding, and there will be no sitting on the sidelines in 2014 for those concerned with gun rights. They will all vote.

Let the Democrats bring up another gun control bill. Let their hate cloud their strategic thinking. Let them keep making mistakes.